Thursday, July 2, 2015

Independence Day in the
U.S.A. this year has special significance for all Americans who have long
believed, or have finally come to accept, that an individual should not be discriminated
against simply because he or she loves someone of the same gender.

The wide acceptance of the
Supreme Court's recent decision that "the right to marry is a fundamental
right" and that "couples of the same sex may not be deprived of the
fundamental right to marry" makes me proud to be an American.

I was so delighted with
the decision that this past Sunday I picked up the Orange County Register, a very conservative newspaper in my area,
with anticipation of schadenfreude that
the editors would be morally and politically outraged at the decision. I wanted
to gloat over that.

However, I was happily
surprised that the lead editorial in the Register
was headed "Expanding liberty for all." The editors agreed with the
Court that to "suppress the freedom of same-sex couples to devote
themselves to each other in the same manner as opposite-sex couples is misguided,
and we should be proud that our society is turning away from this misuse of
law." The editorial in this very
conservative Orange County newspaper agreed with me and many others, concluding:
"Today, I feel especially proud to be an American."

Of course, recently Americans
have been torn about something for which they are not proud—a reminder of
racism that at one time was so strong it threatened to rend the country into
two separate entities. And a powerful symbol of that hateful history—the Confederate
flag—has been at the center of the debate.

Born in the border state
of Kentucky, I understand the powerful symbolism of that flag, even though I
repudiate one of the terribly hateful facts that it stood for. I agree with
those who feel it is long past time to take the flag down from public buildings
and sites, for whatever else it symbolizes, it is a reminder of a shameful
chapter in American history.

Independence Day and
reminders of the Civil War this year reminded me of one of the most famous
short stories in American life—Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without A
Country." Written specifically to challenge the Southern Rebellion and to
remind the citizens that their allegiance was to the United States of American,
the story was published in The Atlantic
Monthly in 1863, even as the tide was beginning to turn in favor of the
North. It was pirated and reprinted and sold over half a million copies within
the year. It made Hale a celebrity and his central character in the story,
Philip Nolan, famous.

Reviewers said it was
unanimously conceded that Hale had no superior in America as a writer of short
stories. When he died in 1909, his obituary notice called "Man Without a
Country" the most popular short story ever written in America.

In that same year, H.S.
Canby, in his book The Short Story in
English, said that what makes the story so memorable, even though it lacks
the tightness and complexity of the best short stories, is that Hale hit upon a
"striking situation" and made the story center on it until the end.

The story is about a young
officer who gets seduced by the grandiose and perhaps treasonable plans of
Aaron Burr. At his court martial, which takes place on the 23rd of
September, 1807, the judge gives the young lieutenant a chance to redeem himself
by asking him if he wished to make a statement to show he had always been
faithful to the United States. In a mad state of anger and frenzy, Nolan cries
out: "Damn the United States! I
wish I may never her of the United States again!"

The Colonel who is
conducting the court, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, is so shocked that he
sentences Nolan to have his wish granted—that he shall never hear the name of
the United States again. He is to be incarcerated on U.S. ships and never
allowed to come any closer than a hundred miles to U.S. shores. Although he is
to be exposed to no indignity or be reminded that he is a prisoner, he is
denied all books that mention the U.S. Any reference to the U.S. is cut out of
newspapers, so he may be reading something and find a great hole or gap in the
text.

Nolan laughs at the
sentence at first and remains arrogant for a time as he is moved from ship to
ship. However, the turning point in the story comes when Nolan joins the
officers on deck who are taking turns reading poems and stories aloud. Nolan
reads from Sir Walter Scott's "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and when
he gets to the following lines, he breaks down:

Breathes
there the man with soul so dead

Who
never to himself hath said,

This
is my own my native land!

The narrator of the story
says Nolan was never the same again and wears the look of a "heart-wounded
man."

The rest of the story describes
a few episodes of Nolan's life during the fifty-six years of his banishment:
his bravery during a battle of the War of 1812, his serving as a nurse to
wounded men, his study of plants and insects brought to him by sea men, his
acting as a lay chaplain, his empathy for African slaves freed from a slave ship,
his eloquent repentance of his denial of his country, and his warning to other
young men to be true to their homeland.

The story ends with the
death of Nolan in his eighties as finally he is allowed to hear the history of
the U.S. during his exile. A slip of paper found in his Bible after his death
states what he wishes to be written on his tombstone:

"In Memory of
Philip Nolan, Lieutenant in the Army of the United States. He loved his country as no other man has
loved her, but no man deserved less at her hands."

Although the story is
little known now, it once was required reading in junior high and high school
textbooks in America. I remember reading it when I was a child in a Classics
Illustrated comic book edition. It was read on the radio several times during
the 1940's. For example, Bing Crosby
narrated a reading of the story for the Philco Radio program in 1947 just before
Thanksgiving. It has also been filmed several times, the most recent being a
1973 made-for-television movie starring Cliff Robertson as Philip Nolan.

In an introduction to the
story, Hale says he wrote it in the "darkest period of the Civil War, to
show what love of country is." He says he has heard many examples of its
"having been of use" during the Civil War. Calling it a
"parable," Hale says it was his intention to describe the life of a
man "who tried to separate himself from his country, to show how terrible
was his mistake."

A simple parable, the story
never had much respect among academic critics, and Hale was seldom, if ever,
taught in university classroom, nor is it any longer anthologized for the
edification of junior high school students, at least as far as I can determine.
Even as long ago as 1970, when I did a search for it in print, I could find it
anthologized in only one short story text: An
Anthology of Famous American Short Stories, edited by Burrell and Cerf for
Random House in 1953..

It is of interest to me as
a critic and scholar of the short story, for it is one of the rare cases when a
short story—not a novel or a play, but a mere short story—had a powerful impact
on the minds of its readers. Granted, it
is a simple story, rather carelessly written, and obviously designed for a
polemical purpose, but simplistic as it is, it has many of the characteristics
of what I have come to recognize as central to the short story as a genre.

It illustrates the central
characteristic of the form that Frank O'Connor argued for his book The Lonely Voice, and which I have tried
to further clarify and develop in my own modest book I Am Your Brother—

"Always in the
short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes
of society…. As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic
something we do not often find in the novel—an intense awareness of human
loneliness."

The atomistic short story
seems perfectly appropriate for dealing with the life of the atomistic and
isolated character. Because he has denied his country, Nolan is made to wander,
like the archetypal wander Cain. Like the Ancient Mariner, he has denied the
unity of life, but even worse than Cain, he is forbidden to tell his story.

In terms of technique, the
story tries to create a sense of reality so strong that it makes readers ask,
"Did that really happen?" Another story in American literature
created this kind of engagement and belief—Shirley Jackson's story "The
Lottery," which had people writing countless letters asking her where the
horrifying lottery actually took place.

It is not a story that
needs to be read carefully, for it succeeds primarily because of its concept
rather than its human complexity or its narrative technique.

3 comments:

In terms of technique, the story tries to create a sense of reality so strong that it makes readers ask, "Did that really happen?"

I was one of those readers, that is until I read your post today, who thought it was based on a true story! I remember thinking as a child how could a judge get away with giving such a cruel sentence. I suspect I read the story in the classroom as a tie-in with the Cliff Robertson television movie (although I'm getting at that age where my childhood recollection has officially entered the fuzzy zone.

Thru the years I've occasionally thought of "The Man Without a Country" so after reading your wonderful post, I'm now wondering if certain historical moments have triggered the memory. It's a tribute to Hale that for those of us who either read, listened or watched it, his story holds a special power.

I was made to read this story in 1969 in my junior year of high school, in a midwestern university town, and never ever was it made clear the context of this story, it's timing and intention as a political comment on the Civil War. I never knew this until I read your post just now. This clarifies a great deal. Obviously, without context it appeared to me as a simple, didactic, nationalistic story. It does seem to me now that all the required books for high school then seemed to have been chosen for their lack of any political or sexual content. Of course, that sort of theme is often found in great literature.

Tenth Anniversary of My Blog

Friday, Nov. 16, is the tenth anniversary of my blog. I have been taking some time off because I have been working on a new book on the short story. I have submitted a proposal to a publisher and am waiting for a reply. I will let you know when I hear from them. Thank you for continuing to read essays in my archives.

Now Available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle

Click cover to go to Amazon and read the Introduction and first chapter.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."